Shopify Now Offers Ecommerce Policy Templates

Privacy, Service, and Refund policies can be critically important to your ecommerce store – both for your legal protection and that of your customers. But writing these policies yourself can be difficult, and hiring a lawyer to draft them is expensive. Don’t worry – Shopify has your back. Our new policy generator in your store's dashboard makes it fast and easy to create custom policies for your store. And best of all, it’s free! Read on for a breakdown of the 3 different policy templates we now offer, and why your store might need them:

Why Do I Need a Privacy Policy?

It’s the law. In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, there are legal directives that require websites to post privacy policies.

Many online consumers are worried about protecting their personal and financial information. A privacy policy gives them confidence that they can trust you with their info.

If your store has a payment gateway, they will likely want you to have a privacy policy before they approve you.

Terms of Service

A Terms of Service is a list of rules that tell visitors what they are and aren’t allowed to do while visiting your online store (such as hacking, spamming, or posting obscene comments). You’ll also see this policy referred to as “terms and conditions”, “terms of use” or “terms.”

Why do I need a Terms of Service?

It reassures your customers that they won’t be exposed to spammers, viruses or obscene comments.

If there’s a disagreement between you and a visitor, it can protect you from being sued.

Again, certain payment gateways require all ecommerce stores to have a Terms of Service as a part of their approval process.

Returns and Refund Policy

A refund policy lets your buyers know what to do if they’re unhappy with their purchase.

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49 comments

Dylan

August 01 2012, 02:45PM

Awesome! So great to see these go live!

Stacey & co, you rock.

Alex

August 01 2012, 02:56PM

Awesome!

Jennifer

August 01 2012, 02:58PM

This is great, I’ll definitely be using these.

Martha

August 01 2012, 02:58PM

Hope to see these policies available in other languages soon!

Brad

August 01 2012, 03:09PM

Timing is perfect!!!!

Jamie

August 01 2012, 03:10PM

Yay!

Jon

August 01 2012, 03:32PM

Love it! Thanks Guys!

Eric M

August 01 2012, 03:34PM

Does this come with Facebook Ad Credits for existing users? Just kidding.

Caroline

August 01 2012, 04:23PM

Two weeks too late.

Mike

August 01 2012, 04:59PM

AWESOME!!! Excited to see this!!

mark

August 01 2012, 05:32PM

You guys are the best. We love you !!

Regina

August 01 2012, 08:36PM

Wish this had been available a couple of weeks ago when I slaved all morning creating my own privacy policy.
This is great though.
Now, how about creating a contact form my customers can fill out on my store. :)

Fred Perrotta

August 01 2012, 09:44PM

Thanks for adding this. So awesome. I used other templates and generators in the past but prefer using Shopify, a company I trust, rather than random sketchy websites.

Rodney

August 01 2012, 09:59PM

Who’s complaining? Some people I swear. Thanks Shopify, you guys are really going the extra mile to see that we all are successful. Regina, in regards to the contact form, you can find those all day on google. Try www.foxyform.com. I used it and it works great. Check it out http://www.gogoshack.com/pages/contact

JP

August 02 2012, 12:09AM

This is so cool, I was looking for these policies tonight & you’ve made it available.

Ashish

August 02 2012, 05:26AM

Just in time. Was about to drill my brain over terms n condition. Thanks.

Basketball Megastore

August 02 2012, 07:58AM

This is really cool. Above and beyond the call of duty in terms of what Shopify offers to their users. Fantastic service.

Rick Davies

August 02 2012, 11:14AM

Roxy! Nice one.

Bergstrom Originals

August 02 2012, 02:08PM

This is great! Although, I did manage to create my own….this now makes the task much less daunting! Keep up the great improvements :)

The Squawk Shoppe

August 02 2012, 02:34PM

This is fantastic! These are things that save us money on lawyers. Nicely done.

Bethany

August 02 2012, 04:02PM

Ya, Facebook sucks. Shopify rocks. Keepup the good work.

Alysa

August 02 2012, 07:24PM

You guys are fantastic! Best online service i have ever used! …like actually!

Roni

August 02 2012, 08:01PM

This is amazing and perfect timing—rock stars, you are

Eric

August 03 2012, 09:14AM

Nice. So where exactly do these show up to the customer?

Mark

August 03 2012, 09:55AM

Eric, they show up the footer of the checkout http://cl.ly/IW1l

Kate

August 03 2012, 11:58AM

Amazing!! Thank you! :)

Craig

August 03 2012, 10:26PM

This is great. Does anybody have any advice on how I turn the link text to another color? They are automatically black it seems, and my background is black. So the footer links are there in checkout, but invisible.

Paul Talarico

August 06 2012, 11:30PM

Thanks Guys. Very helpful.
Really appreciate the constant support and tools.
:-)

Devan Walding

August 07 2012, 01:38AM

Fantastic. It is great that Shopify is continually trying to make their service better and never satisfied with what they have. This is why I continue to support this platform.

Kevin Englund

August 22 2012, 04:20PM

Perfect I was just about to spend money to have a lawyer do up some policies. Great news.

Marni

August 27 2012, 08:44AM

You guys are stars! Finally someone wants to actually help their customers rather than take money off them, hence why I love Shopify and continue to support everything they do since I’ve been a part of their community :’).

Jesse

November 08 2012, 03:35PM

Thank you so much for this. Saved a tremendous amount of time and hassle!

Jack

June 14 2013, 02:20PM

I wish I had found this before I paid someone to have this done. Thank you and I’ll probably be using yours.. LOL

Suzanne

August 15 2013, 04:37PM

This is great but where can these be viewed on my website?

Copper Whispers

February 27 2014, 08:07AM

How would you put these Statements on ALL pages, and not just the Checkout page?

No here’s the link for T&C, and rest of them you can find in resources in links bellow this generator http://ecommerce.shopify.com/policy-generator/terms-and-conditions

Williams

November 14 2015, 08:17AM

I am Mr.Larry and would like to order(Generator) and what would be the price for each unit so that i can Quote you with the Quantity i want
to order..Also what type of payment do you accept,Thank you and reply ASAP

Regards

Rowby Goren

November 25 2015, 07:57AM

These Terms and Conditions are excellently written. Even better they automatically pull from the store’s account information the address of the store, email info, etc.

Very will thought through.

Rowby

Hakon Ingvaldsen

June 10 2016, 05:14PM

To make this even better, you should create generator where you can choose country/region. There is NO WAY the generated TOS will be egible for E.U. businesses. Impossible to get E.U. merchant account with these. They would not comply to E.U. laws either, so are only useful if your business has an U.S address and U.S payment solution.

For U.S. businesses: Great service!

Ian M

July 13 2016, 11:57AM

Hi, can anyone help with this please? We are loading up our shop website and have added our own details to the refund policy, privacy policy and TOS. Whilst I recognise that this content will be be made available during the checkout process, we want to make this information accessible at all times, from the footer section of our site.

We have already added a Terms and conditions link (and will probably also add a separate privacy policy link (as this is best practice), however, I can’t find how to link to where the content of these policies sits in the Shopify CMS.

Is the best way of achieving this to make new pages to house this content? So from anywhere on the site, prior to checkout, if people want TOS type info they get routed to the new page/s, and during the checkout process the info will be there anyway because it’s in the CMS.

We just need to bear in mind that if we make any amends to this content, we have to update both sources of info.

Hopefully that is the answer unless someone knows of an easier way! Thank you, Ian.

Shanti Ranjan Sarker

October 22 2016, 06:16AM

I have a eCommerce online shop which is assorted with shopify in Bangladesh. I need documents how to buy, customer privacy and return policy. Please help me

Shanti Ranjan Sarker

October 22 2016, 06:40AM

Please help me to provide me write up copy how to by and return policy for ecobang

Ido

November 29 2016, 04:23AM

Do you have it in french? What’s the legislation about these?

Paul Wild

December 20 2016, 09:26AM

On our Shopify site (wildpearlgirl) we would like to put links to TOS, Privacy, and Refund policies on footer of Home Page. How do we do that?
Thanks.

Renee

January 07 2017, 04:34PM

Is there a way to switch languages? Spanish?

Jessica

May 09 2017, 03:05PM

I was wondering the same as Renee. Is there a translation in Spanish? Thanks!

Sam

July 12 2017, 10:26AM

Dear Shopify, was wondering the same as Renee and Jessica, however then I would like to know if there is a Portuguese version available as well?